Book overview
Fundamentals of Industrial Hygiene is a practical, full-color guide to anticipating, recognizing, evaluating, and controlling workplace health hazards. Written for students, industrial hygiene technicians, safety professionals, occupational health practitioners, environmental health specialists, and early-career industrial hygienists, it connects core science with the decisions made in real workplaces.
Across 16 detailed chapters, the book builds a complete industrial hygiene framework, from toxicology and exposure assessment through air sampling, instrumentation, analytical quality, engineering controls, respiratory protection, noise, physical agents, radiation, biological hazards, ergonomics, and integrated program management.
Inside this book, readers will learn how to:
- Understand the role of industrial hygiene, professional judgment, and the hierarchy of controls.
- Apply occupational toxicology concepts, including routes of exposure, dose-response relationships, target-organ effects, acute and chronic toxicity, and biological response.
- Interpret occupational exposure limits, averaging periods, uncertainty, variability, and exposure data.
- Develop workplace characterization plans, identify Similar Exposure Groups, select workers and tasks for monitoring, and design defensible exposure assessment strategies.
- Perform and evaluate occupational air sampling using pumps, sampling media, calibration procedures, blanks, sample volume, gravimetric methods, and quality-control checks.
- Assess aerosols, dusts, fumes, fibers, mists, gases, vapors, and solvents using appropriate sampling approaches.
- Use direct-reading instruments for screening, peak detection, task characterization, process evaluation, and control verification.
- Interpret laboratory results, detection limits, blanks, precision, accuracy, geometric statistics, data distributions, and sampling quality.
- Apply engineering controls and industrial ventilation principles, including enclosure, isolation, local exhaust ventilation, hood design, airflow, duct systems, capture, and performance verification.
- Understand respiratory protection, filters, cartridges, assigned protection concepts, fit testing, seal checks, protective clothing, gloves, eye protection, and administrative controls.
- Evaluate occupational noise, sound pressure levels, frequency, dosimetry, time-weighted exposure, hearing protection, and hearing-conservation programs.
- Assess heat and cold stress, lighting, vibration, pressure-related hazards, and other physical agents.
- Distinguish ionizing and non-ionizing radiation hazards and apply monitoring, shielding, distance, time, and source-control principles.
- Address biological hazards, indoor exposure concerns, repetitive work, force, posture, manual handling, workstation design, and emerging occupational health risks.
- Integrate investigation planning, corrective actions, management of change, contractor reviews, program auditing, documentation, and professional decision-making into an effective industrial hygiene program.
The book also includes more than 100 full-color educational illustrations and a comprehensive appendix section with equations, unit conversions, exposure-assessment worksheets, sampling and QA/QC checklists, calculation-verification tools, control and PPE worksheets, physical-agent assessment tools, and program-management templates.
Fundamentals of Industrial Hygiene is designed to work as both a structured learning resource and a practical professional reference. Whether you are studying industrial hygiene for the first time, supporting a workplace health and safety program, preparing for field responsibilities, or strengthening your technical reference library, this book provides a clear, systematic foundation for better exposure assessment and workplace hazard contr
